


Happy Endings

by rattyjol



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: /is irrationally attached to taurie, Gen, Self-Reflection, happy endings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 12:31:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4625454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rattyjol/pseuds/rattyjol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All those years ago, when Miles conjured another self out of thin air, he wasn't thinking about where that self might end up one day—there wasn't room to think much of anything beyond <i>forward momentum</i>. Put one foot in front of the other, see where it takes you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Happy Endings

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted by tigriswolf at comment_fic LJ: [Author’s choice, author’s choice, maybe we got our happy ending in another life](http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/643942.html?thread=87360614#t87360614)

Admiral Naismith was never going to have a happy ending.  
  
All those years ago, when Miles conjured another self out of thin air, he wasn't thinking about where that self might end up one day—there wasn't room to think much of anything beyond  _forward momentum_. Put one foot in front of the other, see where it takes you.  
  
And it took him everywhere. Earth, Tau Ceti, Dagoola IV—all over the charted nexus, and the uncharted too sometimes, and when you're fighting to stay alive today, you don't have much time to think about where you might be tomorrow. Where your other self might be tomorrow. (Which one is the other? Sometimes, he forgets.)  
  
But any way you looked at it, Naismith could only have ended one of two ways: death by battle, or death by politics. But death at the wrong end of that needle grenade wasn't enough—Naismith had to go for the second kind too. Well, Miles had never done anything by halves.  
  
Sometimes Miles thinks about the closet in his old room in Vorkosigan House. The Admiral's uniform is still there, if no one's bothered to pack it up and move it—sometimes he thinks about going to find it, not to wear but just to see, to touch, to prove that Naismith was real—but Miles has his scars for that, and his seizure stimulator, and his stories. The jacket would never close around his waist now, and he stumbles over the Betan vowels when he tells watered-down stories to the kids.  
  
Once, Taurie asks if she can help him burn an offering for the Admiral—he starts, wonders if he hadn't been as clear as he thought, wonders if he's starting to forget himself again. But she hits him with one of those looks he can't resist, dammit, after four kids you'd think he'd be immune—and the next time they visit Vorkosigan Surleau, he digs out the brass braziers and helps her light three offerings, for his father and grandfather and Naismith. Two admirals and a general, huh.  
  
He looks over at Taurie as the offerings burn—she's sprouting like a weed, bless Ekaterin's genes, and she's perilously close to being nearly as tall as he is. When did that happen? She was supposed to be the baby . . .  
  
Miles sighs, breath fogging in the cool morning air. Naismith, for all that he could do the impossible, could never have done this. Could never have been this. Naismith was only ever the Admiral—Vorkosigan gets to be Da. Vorkosigan gets to be  _old_.  
  
They trudge back inside, and Miles leaves the last of Naismith out there in the graveyard, with his father and grandfather and the Vorkosigans of old. He thinks they'll get along just fine.


End file.
